Reuters reports that Broadview Heights-based Sotera Health, which runs facilities that sterilize medical products and food, "is exploring a potential sale worth as much as $5 billion including debt."

Citing sources "familiar with the matter," Reuters said the company's private equity owners, Warburg Pincus and GTCR, "are working with investment banks to assist them in the sales process." Discussions "are in the early stages, and there is no guarantee a transaction will result," according to the story.

Warburg Pincus declined to comment, Reuters said, while GTCR and Sotera did not respond to requests for comment.

If a deal to buy the company is successful, "it will be one of the largest private equity deals in the health care industry this year," the news service reports.

It notes that Sotera, formerly known as Sterigenics International, "could appeal to both private equity buyers and strategic buyers given the stability of its business."

Sources told Reuters that privately held Sotera has earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization of around $400 million a year. Sotera was acquired by GTCR in 2011 from private investment firms Silverfleet Capital and PPM America Capital Partners. In 2015, it sold a majority stake to Warburg Pincus.

DOUBT THEY'LL EXCHANGE HOLIDAY CARDS

New York-based Axiom Capital Management and the firm's managing director, Gordon Johnson, on Wednesday morning, Aug. 29, announced they have settled a dispute dating from last year with Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. and the mining company's chairman, president and CEO, Lourenco Goncalves.

Specific terms of the settlement weren't disclosed. However, as part of the settlement, Johnson and Axiom said they "acknowledge the omission of additional stock purchase information in their May 4, 2017 analyst note, which contained a sell recommendation in response to Mr. Goncalves' May 3, 2017 open-market purchase of CLF shares."

For some background, here's a story we wrote in May 2017 (when Cliffs was still known as Cliffs Natural Resources Inc.) about the conflict. It began this way:

Mining and iron ore company Cliffs Natural Resources Inc. (NYSE: CLF) of Cleveland is pushing back against what it calls "inaccurate and materially misleading" information about the company and its CEO, Lourenco Goncalves, published by Barron's and Axiom Capital Management.

In a news release issued Thursday afternoon, May 4, Cliffs responded to a Barron's article by Ben Levisohn and a column on Barron's website by Axiom managing director Gordon L. Johnson about the May 3 purchase of 200,000 Cliffs shares by Goncalves. The column by Johnson was posted at 3:36 a.m. on Thursday. The story by Levisohn, a stock market blogger and columnist at Barron's, was posted later in the morning.

Cliffs said both the column and the story "include statements that are inaccurate and materially misleading regarding Mr. Goncalves's previous share purchases."Indeed, on Wednesday, Axiom and Johnson said that "information omitted in the original report includes other material purchases of CLF shares, which were publicly disclosed in CLF's Form 4 filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for Mr. Goncalves." They also published a chart showing the purchases and each of their respective performances.

They concluded their statement this way: "In spite of these results, Johnson and Axiom stand by their May 4, 2017 sell recommendation for CLF shareholders."

Cliffs stock was trading on Wednesday morning at around $10.20 per share. Its 52-week high is $11.44, and the 52-week low is $5.60.

OFF TRACK?

Should you take advantage of technology to track the location of your teenager?

That's the question at the heart of this piece in The New York Times by Shaker Heights psychologist and author Lisa Damour.

From the story:

As the school year gets underway, parents who have just dropped their teenagers off on college campuses may be watching on apps like Life 360 as their freshly minted freshmen try to figure out the best route from dorm to dining hall.

Indeed, the ability to locate our children using GPS technology touches on some of the most loaded topics in all of parenting: questions of trust and safety, a young person's right to privacy and autonomy, and the gut-wrenching truth that to be a parent is "to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body."

A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center found that while most adults don't location-track their 13- to 17-year-olds, a full 16 percent of parents do. Given that we can use tracking apps to surveil our ambulatory hearts, should we?

Damour talks with Lorrie Faith Cranor, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University who studies children's privacy and safety in the context of technology, and has decided against monitoring the location of her two teenagers.

"It's tempting to do it because we are all worried about our kids," Cranor says, noting that she resists the urge because she doesn't want her children to "feel like their parents are following them around all the time."

Damour writes that it's "easy enough to point to the downsides of location tracking, but can it ever be a good idea to track a young person's movements by phone? Yes, if we keep some key parameters in mind." Among those: make safety a collaborative effort, appreciate the limitations of location tracking, and treat it as temporary.

She concluded this way: "Raising teenagers comes with some guaranteed discomforts. We often do not know where our children are, what they are doing and if they'll tell us the truth should we ask. Location tracking allows us to address some of these concerns even as it exacerbates an age-old parenting tension: We want to keep our children safe, maintain a loving connection and, simultaneously, foster their independence."